Blogs, Making Money Online

Blog Commenting: Video 1

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Alright, so here is a quick video about how and why you want to do blog commenting. So basically, here’s the idea. Lots and lots of people have blogs, in whatever industry or arena you are working inside of. In this case, I’m going to show marketing blogs, but you could do whatever you wanted to do as far as whatever your industry is in going and commenting on other people’s blogs.

So what I did was I actually hired somebody to go and to find blogs dealing with marketing. They went out and found all these different websites; they came back with a list of the Top 200 websites in terms of traffic and ranking for me and I loaded them into a Google Reader account.

So I’m going to go in and log into my gmail account. If you don’t have a gmail account, you could set this up on your own, get a gmail account which is free.

But basically all I did was … I went in and set up an account for our Three Money Methods site.

If I click on “Reader” once I’m logged in here, by the way, don’t send email to ThreeMoneyMethods at gmail.com because I won’t get it – I just don’t check this account for anything. But if you click on Reader inside of here, I’ve loaded all of the blogs in here. I actually had somebody go in and add subscriptions to all of these blogs. So they just went through one by one and added subscriptions to the blogs.

So I can click on “All Items” inside of here and I can read the most recent posts, today’s a Saturday, so there won’t be many that are too recent, but I can read the most recent posts about whatever people are talking about within the marketing arena.

So, “Which CMS do you use?” Which Content Management System do you use? I’ll go ahead and open the link in a new tab and scroll down here; I’ve got a new tab opening at the moment; “Giving Affiliate Marketing another Go,” this is a guy who’s trying to do Affiliate Marketing, I’m opening that in a new tab, “AffMeter List of Supported Affiliate Networks Grows” … “Photos from my 27th Birthday” … ok, maybe we’ll post something in there … “Learning Specificity in Marketing.” Ok, I’ve got four tabs open now; you can see these here, “Which CMS?” “Giving Affiliate Marketing another Go.”

So, I’m going to go ahead and go to the first one here, “Which CMS do you use?” Inside of here, “Which CMS do you use,” people use WordPress, blah, blah, blah. I’ve already commented on this site, so you can see that my information is already in here. “Hey, I use Movable Type and WordPress. I like Movable Type because it allows multiple websites from one installation, but I like WordPress because there are so many great tools for it that people have created.”

Maybe you don’t know anything about Content Management Systems; so read the post and learn about it from whatever they’re saying here and then comment something that’s relevant to the discussion that’s going on. I just happen to know already the answer to the question, “What CMS do you use,” so I’m going to go ahead and post this comment. “Thanks for talking about your WordPress experience though. Good to know why other people choose the CMS that they do. Warmest, Jonathan.”

Sometimes, if I’ve commented on a website before, I will put my web address actually in the comments if I know that it’s going to show up on the website. If I don’t know that it’s going to show up on the website, I won’t put my web address in here because I’ve already had the opportunity to put it in up here. I’m just going to shorten this down, MoneyMethods online and that’s it. “I use Movable Type and WordPress, blah, blah, blah.” I’m going to go ahead and “Submit Comment.”

I’m going to do the same thing on this post, on this post, on this post and on as many other posts as I can, or want to, inside of here. Now again, you want to actually make comments that are relevant to what people are talking about. Number one, you’re building relationships with all the top people in your arena and number two; you are posting links to bring people back to your website. But first and foremost, you’re building relationships! So you want actually to post something that’s relevant to what they’re saying inside of their post.

The reason I want to show you this here is if I go into my Google Analytics account, I can show you the difference between posting blog comments and not posting blog comments.

So I’m going to go log-in to Google Analytics here and we’re looking at Three Money Methods inside of Google Analytics and this is just referring sites that referred people just to the front page of ThreeMoneyMethods.com. Inside of here, you can see, I’ve got pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic (laughs), pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic; all this no traffic, no traffic, no traffic. Hey, then one day it jumps to five and three and three, and look at this! Thirteen visits and the vast majority of this is coming from blog commenting! All I did was go post some comments on other people’s well-trafficked websites, to actually add some conversation to the discussion and become part of what’s going on in the community.

I posted this day, I posted this day, posted blog comments. I don’t even think I posted any on this day and I didn’t post any on this day. But hey, look! I posted a bunch this day and I brought in 20 visitors basically to my website that day. I didn’t post any Thursday and I didn’t post any on Friday, but I’m still picking up residual traffic from the work I did on Wednesday!

All you have to do to bring people to your website is go and post comments on other people’s websites that are already getting traffic! Become part of the conversation of what’s going on in your industry and your arena and you can actually bring traffic back to your website to get them to do whatever you want them to do on your website!

Now the only thing you can do on Three Money Methods, when people come to this page, the only thing they can do is actually put their name and email in; they either go away or they put their name and email in; now I’ve done that on purpose. But whatever goal it is that you have for your website, you can use blog commenting just to bring people to the website.

So here’s the deal; I have three different lists that I have put together – the top 200 blogs. I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “green,” I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “travel” and I’ve got the top 200 blogs in “marketing.” If you will come to ThreeMoneyMethods.com and put your name and email in, I will give you what’s called an OPML feed to just upload automatically into your Google Reader; so you don’t have to go through the process of hiring somebody to find the top 200-250 blogs and then put them into your Google Reader, all you have to do is download one file from Three Money Methods website after you put your name and email in, just download this file and then upload it into your Google Reader and you’ll have all of those blogs already sitting in your Google Reader for free, from me just in exchange for putting your name and email in here at ThreeMoneyMethods.com.

Go ahead and come to the website – I hope this tip has been very helpful for you. Posting comments on other people’s blogs is a great way to find out what’s going on in your industry and your arena and it’s also a great way to get people back to your website to do whatever you want them to do once they’ve actually come to you to find out more information about what it is that you do.

So, I hope this has been very helpful — definitely come visit us at Three Money Methods for more great tips about how to do online marketing!

Thank you very much for taking the time to watch this video.

HTML Advanced, HTML Basics, Making Money Online

Title Tags, Keyword Tags, and Meta Description Tags

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Welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I am your host Jonathan Kraft and here to talk with you today about Title Tags, Keyword Tags and Meta-Description Tags. So initially, back in 1996 and 1998, they started creating ways to organize websites. To actually be able to access the websites and know what they were about, they created these things called Title Tags, Keyword Tags and Meta-Description Tags.

Let’s just do a search on Google for … “make money online.” It’s a very common, popular term and gets a lot of searches. So here we see a few different things on Google. I’ve sized down my screen so this is really big. You see on one side we have the sponsored links and also up top here we have the sponsored links. “Make money online;” “make money online fast;” “make money online.” These in the orange are sponsored links and these on the right-hand side are also sponsored links. That means that someone has paid for those links. But then, if we scroll down here, we have “makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com;” we have “entrepreneurs.about.com;” we have “moneymakers.blogspot.com;” we have “team-schuman;” “forbes;” “financial planning;” “Carlo Cab.”  I have been on Carlo Cab’s website before and I know he’s got some really cool stuff on here so I’m sure that he’s done a good job with his description tag, his title tag and his keywords tags.

So what we’re going to do is go ahead and open this in a new tab and I’ve sized it up so you can see it. If you look at this website, we have Carlo Cab, and what we’re going to do is go to View-Page Source. Inside of the page source here you can see a few different things. We have title tag, “make money at home with a 13-year old;” “make money online;” keywords tag, down at the bottom here we have a description and a keywords tag; description: “discover how a 13-year-old made money online. Make money online topics include Blogging, Internet Marketing, AdSense and a lot more.”

And you then see underneath there he’s got a meta tag and the content is “make money online;” “make money from home;” “make money at home;” “blogging;” “make money blogging;” “internet marketing.” He has very good keyworded description, title and keywords tags.

So those three tags look like this: if you were looking at a webpage from scratch, here’s what you would see: html and /html (end html). You don’t really need to know all of this stuff either, because if you’re using WordPress or Movable Type or some other Content Management System (CMS), they handle a lot of this stuff for you. But you can use what you’re learning here to make sure that it’s actually being handled correctly. You do have to learn a little bit in order to have the kind of success that you want to have online, but you can use the tools; you just need to double-check to make sure that its doing what you want it to do for you.

So this is what a basic structure of what a website would look like: you have turn on HTML, turn off HTML. You have a header which carries all kinds of description stuff, information about a website, you have a /header and start the body, which is what you actually see on the webpage, and then /body.

Inside of the header tag, you have title and /title. You also have meta, content=”whatever” and / that.

With meta tag in the header you don’t have to go /meta.

It just knows automatically that this carat (>) ends the meta description. Then you also have a meta and content=”whatever.”

So if you were going to build a page about “make money online” it would probably be a really good idea to make the title of your page “Make Money Online.” Probably a really good idea in the description is to say something about “making money online is relatively simple.” Keep it short here. “Learn to make money online.” The keywords=”make money online; money online revenue;” whatever your page is about.

So here’s what I want to go back to Google and show you; you go back over here and we’re going to leave Carl Ocab’s website here. Go back to our Google search for “make money online.” See how this says right here in the title tag: “Make money online. Make money at home with a 13-year-old.” Well, what does that look like? It IS the exact same thing as Carl’s title tag. “Make money online” <break> ‘Make money at home with a 13-year-old.” That is what actually shows up in the search results, the title tag to try and bring people back to your website.

Now if we go “discover how a 13-year-old made money online.” “Make money online topics include Blogging, Internet Marketing, AdSense and a lot more.” What does that look like? Well, if we go in here, we can see in the description “Discover how a 13-year-old made money online.” ”Make money online topics include Blogging, Internet Marketing, AdSense and a lot more.” It’s the exact same thing! The thing that shows up in the search engine optimized results to bring people to your website is the meta description and the title tag. So you want to make sure your title tag and your description tag really help people to want to come to your website.

You’ve got to do a really good job of writing description tags and title tags that make people want to come to your website. Sometimes I’ll use a word like “What — I can make money online?” You might be more interested in coming to a website if it actually has some appeal to you. If you’re reading along through the search results and you’re like, “Make Money Online;” “Making Money Online;” “What — I can make Money online?” If that showed up in the Top 10 search results here, wouldn’t that stand out a little bit more? Possibly; it might make you want to click and come to that website.

Now there’s a whole art to getting to the top of the search results; but one of the things that it includes is writing really good title and description tags. The keyword tag is not used so much anymore; but I still put it on the page just because I think it’s good to have on there. But what started happening is that people figured out that they could get ranked for things like “Brittany Spears Naked” and stuff like that that people are looking for a lot! Even though their page was about mortgages, they decided to put “Brittany Spears” and “Paris Hilton.” Back in early 2000, 2001 and 2002, if you think about really popular search terms around that timeframe, people were actually putting those in the keywords tag and they were getting traffic for that even though their website had nothing to do with that.

Well, Google now ranks websites on about 200 factors. So you can’t just keywords stuff into your keywords tag here and hope that you’re going to get results. They don’t use this keywords tag so much anymore; but I still think it’s a good thing to have.

Now I want to show you both inside Movable Type and WordPress, they have it setup so that you can automatically put this stuff in there. There’s a plug-in for WordPress called the All in One SEO Pack plug-in that you can download and put into your WordPress installation and I’ll show you what that looks like on our GreenJoyment site.

So if I’m logged into my GreenJoyment store here and I create a new post using WordPress and I scroll down the page here, I have a space for an excerpt which could also become my description; but I also have the All in one SEP pack down here at the bottom. And you can see I can write a title tag, a description tag and a keywords tag for this post. Those tags actually show up on the different posts that I’m writing.

I want to make sure that the title tag I write matches the actual content of whatever I’ve written in WordPress to actually help to try and get that ranking for whatever it is I’m talking about. Writing a really good and very interesting title tag will actually help to bring people to the website and also will let Google know that yes, in fact I am talking about GreenJoyment; we might be talking about inverters or something or how to make your own solar panel. And so if I’m talking in the content about how to build your own solar panels, I’m going to be talking in the title tag about “how to build your own solar panels.” Then the description would be “build your own solar panels … Three Simple Steps.” You want to make sure that what it’s actually about comes first in your description and your title tag.

I’ll show you the same thing inside of our Movable Type installation. These are just different Content Management Systems (CMS). I think we’ve talked already about Content Management and why you should be using some sort of Content Management System.

This is for my Strive4Impact site and I have an excerpt, keywords and a tags title done in here. Well the excerpt becomes the description inside of Movable Type and the keywords become the keywords tag.  But you want to make sure you’re writing a keywords tag, a description tag and a title tag that actually match the content of your post and bring people back to your website for what it is that you’re actually talking about. That will help you get placed well in Google and other search engines for the things that people are looking for.

We’re going to talk later in another video about how to find out what people are looking for so that you can actually talk about those things! But it’s really important to know when you’re writing posts and when you’re building web pages, you really need to pay attention to the description tag, the title tag and than also, to a lesser degree, the keywords tag.

Hopefully that makes sense. If you just go and look at your webpage, just look and see, do you have a title tag, a description tag and a keywords tag? If you don’t, either hire a programmer or learn how to do it yourself, but make sure those things are showing up in your posts so that you can actually start getting search ranked for the things that people are looking for and for the things that you’re talking about.

Like I said, we’re going to do another video about how to find out what people are actually looking for so you can talk about it. But your homework out of this video is to go and find out, do you have these things on your web pages; and if not, get them on there as quickly as possible because this will help you to get traffic from search engines automatically and at no cost to you!

Thank you for watching the Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday! Stay tuned, we’ve got more great videos coming and more great training to learn how to make money online and build a business that let’s you live the life of your dreams!

Making Money Online

How To Use Yahoo Answers To Get Website Traffic

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Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I’m your host Jonathan Kraft and today we are going to be talking about one great place for you to do two things with: one, to get traffic to come into your website via things you post externally and another way to get traffic to come to your site via things that you’re learning from this website about what people are looking for.

So the website is Yahoo Answers and you can get there by just typing in Google “Yahoo Answers” or you can go to answers.yahoo.com. The whole idea behind the Yahoo Answers is people can ask questions and other people can come and answer them. So, for example, here’s a guy who asks the question, “what should I eat for making 1700 calories per day for gaining?” Question for guys, “are belly rings hot?”

Let’s say you had a blog about technology stuff. Here’s somebody who has a question about “wanna race or battle on Mario Kart Wii?” You could create a post called “how to find friends to race on Mario Kart Wii.” If you had a tech blog, you could also talk about what phone you think is suitable for this person or play two sounds at the same time on Movie Maker.

So lots of tech questions in here, but as you’re reading through here you’ll also see there are other ones about travel. For example, “how much for a taxi from Benidorm to Jalon near to Calpe?” I guess this is a question in Spain, but if you have a travel blog, this might be a great question for you to answer on your blog.  If you’re looking for content to write about, this is a great place to learn. “I’m a young, African American woman moving from Chicago to Houston.” Good thing for someone with a Houston blog or for someone who is looking to have a travel blog. You could talk about Chicago and Houston – the kind of issues that people might encounter in Chicago and Houston.

Here’s a geocaching puzzle that finds coordinates to a location #4 – so this is Games and Recreation but it’s also a travel question. So this gives you a great place to just find topics that people are already asking questions about.

The other thing you can do is search; so I’m going to search in here for “green buildings.” I know we just posted on GreenJoyment about this so I’m doing this on purpose, but we might want to do an Advanced Search because we’re pulling up all kinds of old answers. But if you do an Advanced Search here, you can find questions that are still open to be answered. Now you have to setup a Yahoo Profile in order to do this, you can, it’s very simple. So we want the question status to be “open question,” date submitted can be anytime.

So, “what is the going rate when buying a green horse?” “How does a small company get involved in going green?” See I was looking for green buildings but what I was really looking for was how companies can work to go green in their own environments. I know I have a lot of the answers over here in this post on GreenJoyment. So I can just basically copy and paste to answer this question.

“I’m a marketing manager for a small multi-media company with 20 people. We’re looking to get involved in environmentally going green. How can we get involved in a local community with little budget? Also, we are self-serving in the fact that we would like to get some recognition out of this.” So you could answer whatever you wanted. Now this has already had a “Best Answer” chosen by voters.

“When did the “going green” phenomenon begin exactly and for what reasons?” This is a great question … “when did it change from a hippie, tree-hugging thing to a mainstream thing? I’m doing a cultural analysis on this and am looking for some origin info. Any help is much appreciated. Website resources are great too.” This is a question I can answer very easily using tools that we’ve already talked about.

“It seems to have become mainstream sometime around the same time that Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” came out and won so many awards. I think the book “Fast Food Nation” also helped. Here are a couple resource sites you can use: Google Trends (remember we’ve talked about Google Trends in other videos from Three Money Methods); Google Trends shows “going green” trending up about the same time as these books.”

So here’s what I’m going to do is I’m going to go www.google.com/trends. In Google Trends I’m going to type in “Inconvenient Truth” … now this just happens to be a question I know the answer to because I offer it inside the green arena. You’ll know the answers to a lot of the questions people are asking in your arena and that’s the point of this. “Going Green” and let’s type in “Fast Food Nation” as well and “Super Size Me.” So if we look at this here, this is actually a pretty helpful graph for the person who is looking for when this became such a big issue. But really look, “going green” doesn’t really get really big until the middle of 2008.

What I’m going to do though is I’m going to copy the full web address here, so if I copy this, I’m going to actually get rid of Fast Food Nation because it doesn’t really help with the case that I’m trying to make so I’m going to rid of that. Super Size Me is sort of on that chart, so we’ll leave that there for now.

What I’m going to do is then copy this web address and go back over to my Yahoo Answers here and my source to paste that there and then another source is www.GreenJoyment.com. So I’ll just tell her something about Google Trends; “hope that Google Trends helps you out.” I usually put my name in here when I’m answering a question or something because it creates a relationship with people.

But now I’ve got two different web addresses in here, one is my GreenJoyment site and the other one is this Google Trends search. Go ahead and click preview and my answer is down here and hey, look at that; I’ve got two links … one of them comes right back to my website from Yahoo Answers. So I’m going to go ahead and submit.

I’ve helped both to answer her question – here’s someone who’s interested in the market that I’m already involved with. I’ve got a couple of links now coming back to my website from this particular term. If someone actually votes this to be the “Best Answer” then I’ll actually get more points in Yahoo Answers but I’ll also have links coming back to my website from a question that got answered at Yahoo Answers.

It’s a great way to bring traffic back into your website. It’s also a great way to find topics to post about. If I go from her open question here, it has a category called “green living.” I can go into the green living category and find open questions in there to answer. I can also just look at past questions that people have asked that have gotten a lot of attention and I can answer those questions.

Check it out! Start using it!

Yahoo answers is a great way to bring traffic back to your website and also to know what to talk about when you are looking for topics for your website.

keywords, Making Money Online

The Best Keyword Research Tools: Market Research Going Green Example

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Welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays!

This is Jonathan Kraft and today I want to talk about finding out what people are looking for so that you can target your content to the actual words that they’re looking for.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite tools for doing this is Google Trends.

If you’re not familiar with Google Trends, you really, really have to go check it out. It’s basically tracking what people are looking for on the internet right now.

So for today for example, some of the most interesting things people are looking for… “Today’s Hot Trends in the United States” are Jennifer Tisdale – whoever that is; Watkins Glen Weather; Patrick Kane Arrested; David Morgan Whips; Ohio Unemployment; Hall of Fame Game 2009; DC United versus Real Madrid, which is soccer; and What Happened to Forrest Griffin?

So these are very popular topics for today — things that people are looking for.

Well, we have a website in the “green” arena and today I’m just going to do a look for “going green.”

That’s a common term; a popular term that people are looking for right now and I think that if I wanted to build a website around “going green” I might want to talk about the term “going green.”

Well I did a search, you can see up here for the term “going green.” I’m going to move down the page just a little bit here so you can actually see this. This is the Search Volume Index; it’s clearly a rising market and people are definitely becoming much more interested in going green over time.

Starting off in 2005 when Google Trends started, there really wasn’t much interest in going green; but it really peaks here … starts to peak and it gives you some news information about what might have caused that peak; it just shows news related to that.

Let’s say I wanted to build a website about going green or have a website about going green which we do; we have a website called GreenJoyment.com that talks to people about going green. If I want to know is it better to talk to people about “going green” or is it better to use the term “go green?” does this actually make a difference? Well, it actually kind of does! Which is maybe surprising, but if you looking “going green” versus “go green” –  “go green” in this instance is getting more than double the traffic as opposed to “going green.”

If you’re looking to build a website in this arena, it’s probably better for you to try and link back to your site using the term “go green” as opposed to “going green.” Because people are actually looking much more for “go green” instead of “going green.”

Let’s use another example, “mobile phone;” we’ll search the trends here. “Mobile phone” actually appears to be sort of a declining market here a little bit. It just gives you an idea to see what people are looking for – which is great!

Let’s say “mobile phone” versus “cell phone.” If you wanted to market a “mobile phone” or a “cell phone,” which would be better for you to use as a term? Well, “cell phone” is better for you to use. This gives you a concrete way to actually see what is going to be the better term for you to use; a “mobile phone” or a “cell phone.”

Now let’s compare this to something in the same arena, “SMS” for example. “SMS” is like four times the amount of search volume!

Does that mean you’ll be able to market more? Maybe, maybe not. But if you have a website about calling cards, cell phones, mobile phones and SMS text messaging, you might want to talk about “SMS” instead of “cell phones” and “mobile phones” on a more regular basis.

Let’s add one more term in here, let’s try “text messaging” and click “Search Trends.” “Text messaging” is in green; “text messaging” doesn’t even really show up on the chart! It’s a very, very minimal market. So your better bet, if you want to capture a market, instead of “text messaging” would be to talk about “SMS.”  Maybe you didn’t know that before.

Use terms from your market. Is it better to talk about “poodles” or “labradors?” If you’re in the dog market, which one is searched more? Well, it turns out that “poodles” are searched more, at least in 2005-2006, than “labradors.” But look, they actually get closer in 2008-2009; “labradors” are getting more popular, “poodles” getting less popular. Dogs overall are becoming a less popular overall search term.  So you can get an idea here of different markets; it’s just a great way to actually look for what people are looking for.

Two other tools I’m going to show you today: one is the Google Adwords Free Search for what people are looking for.  There are links to these tools right below the video here.

But you can see this is Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can type in descriptive words or phrases and it will give you terms that are relevant to those terms that you’re looking for.  So sticking with our labrador example, let’s type in “labrador” and use synonyms.

You can also filter your results; you can have them not show ideas for new keywords; you can have them include adult content, by default it’s excluded. So we’ll just go ahead and click “Get Keyword Ideas” and Google is going to go out and look through its Search Index to find out what are the most popular terms.

Well, turned out “labrador retriever” is not as popular as “labrador;” but “labrador retriever” is more popular than “labrador puppies.” You can tell by the search volume here.

This is the search volume for June and then there are approximated search volumes. So if you’re going to have a website about “labradors,” you want to use the term “labrador retriever” more often than “labrador puppies.” You want to use the term “labrador retriever” more often than “labrador dogs” because this is what people are looking for more often.

You can also use this to buy Adwords and ads.

But I’m really just talking about creating content using the terms that people are looking for. There’s a link to this right below the video here; if you’re on Three Money Methods, you can actually just link right to this tool.

But it’s just a great way to actually know what people are looking for if you want to talk about “labradors.” So you want to talk much more about “labrador retrievers” than “yellow labradors.”

You also want to talk about “yellow labradors” but you want to talk about “labrador retrievers” more often.

The other tool that I want to show you today is the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool so we’ll go ahead and go to that.

Again, if you’re watching this on the Three Money Methods site there is a link to this right below the video.

This is a website called Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a great product that you can buy and have on a monthly basis and get all kinds of great stuff just actually about keywords and understanding what people are actually looking for.

However, if you aren’t ready to pay for it yet, they also have a free sample of how their service works.

We’ll stick with labradors; let’s go in here and go “labrador.” You can have it remove offensive; you can have it show adult only or you can just turn off the filter. I just always turn off the filter just because I’m trying to get an idea of what it is that people are looking for in the market. This confirms what Google had shown us just a minute ago, “labrador retriever” is really what people are looking for; “labrador puppies” less popular. But you can get an idea also here for some other keywords, things you might want to talk about: “black labrador,” chocolate labrador,” yellow labrador,” “labrador puppy.”

This gives you an idea to talk about these things more often. This is the order in which you want to talk about these items on your website if you want to achieve the maximum level of traffic.

So we learned from our other search that “going green” was not as popular as “go green.” So let’s type in “go green” here and we’ll click “Hit Me” and see what keywords we get here. “Go Green” is definitely, by far, the most popular here.

Then we have “ways to go green;” “why go green;” “go green in your home;” “go green and save money;” “how to go green.” Those are the top five things, six things that I’m going to be talking about, really five things.

I’m going to use “ways to go green” in a lot of posts; I’m going to use “why to go green” in a lot of content that I create; “go green in your home.” I want to use those keyword terms most often because that’s what people are looking for.

You can get an idea also, let’s type in “going green” and see what other kinds of things we get.

There are less searches for “going green;” that’s just confirming what we learned already. But then we’ve got examples of “how going green saves you money;” “companies going green;” “definition of going green;” “going green at home;” “tips for going green;” tips seem to be a common thing that people want; “what does going green mean;” and “going green industry seminars.”

Anyway, here’s the thing, you’re going to get a really good idea of what you should be talking about on your website from this kind of a search.

If you’re looking at this on the Three Money Methods website, we’ve linked to these tools right below the video.

If you’re not, you can do a Google search or if you want an easy way to access these tools, just come to Three Money Methods and join us at ThreeMoneyMethods.com – yes, you will need to put in your name and email address in order to join our community but we’ll give you all kinds of great tools, tips and tricks about how to actually run a business, a successful business online. You’ll have to put your name in there.

We’ll look forward to seeing you then in the next Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays. We’ve got some great stuff coming up next week !

Hope you’re doing well and please leave your comments below the video if you have any thoughts or any additional things that we should have included in this video.

Google Trends
Wordtracker Free Keywords Tool
Google Adwords Free Keywords Tool

HTML Advanced, HTML Basics

File Names, Anchor Text, & ALT Tags

2 Comments

Welcome back to Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I am your host, Jonathan Kraft and today, we’re going to be talking about four very, very important things in terms of getting search traffic from the search engines. These four things are:

  • File Names
  • Anchor Text
  • Link Titles
  • Alt Tags

So we’re going to go through these one by one.

I want to show you some different examples of file names. We’ll just start with file names. So we’re in Google here and we’re going to do a search for something really obscure … I don’t know, something like underwater basket weaving (That’s funny, Underwater Phantaseas is where we’re doing our scuba diving training!).

Let’s try this and see what we get.

Alright, so we have “Underwater Basket Weaving” at Wikipedia, of course; Wikipedia comes up very well.

We have “Underwater Basket Weaving tips” at Blogspot.com.

We also have image results and this is going to be very important in just a minute.

I’m going to go ahead and open these pages from Wikipedia and the page from Basket Weaving Tips.

I want to show you a couple of things. In the actual name of this page, it has “Underwater_basket_weaving.” All three of those words are actually in the title and in the actual name of the page: underwater_basket_weaving.

If you want to get ranked for some term, it’s important that your page title which you actually name the HTML of your title of your page, actually says what it is you are talking about.

Here’s another example; we have “basketweavingtips.blogspot.com” followed by “underwater-basket-weaving-ever-wanted.html”. “Underwater Basket Weaving — Ever Wanted To Try It?” They got to number 3 behind Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary!

And you’ll notice also here in the title they have “underwater%20basket%20weaving.” That’s the page name for that.

One of the ways to get ranked in a search engine is to make sure that when you are naming pages with an HTML file, that you actually name them with the actual terms of what you’re looking for.

Let’s say you’re inside of WordPress; we’re inside of WordPress for our web site Green Joyment for the store here and let’s say I want to go ahead and Add a New Post.

I wanted to add a post about “Build Your Own Wind Generator.” Now I have GreenJoyment.com/store/build-your-own-wind-generator. That’s great! That’s a great keyworded title. If I wanted to change it though and actually change the page name so that it didn’t match what my text was in here, I could do that.

There are some times you’ll want to do that and sometimes you don’t. You’ll just kind of have to go and say, well, is my title relatively keyworded to what I’m saying? Because sometimes you might be talking in your article about building your own wind generator, but you might want to write a title that’s like, “People said I couldn’t do it!” Or something like that; maybe that’s what you want the title of the article to be, but it’s actually about building your own wind generator.

So you want to make sure that the actual file name is actually something that is going to get you traffic for what you are trying to get ranked for and not just something cute. If you’re going for a cute title or a fun title or something like that, “they said I couldn’t do it;” you want to make sure even if you do that, the page name (the actual file name) is something that’s relevant to whatever it is that you’re talking about.

That’s one of our topics for today.  Moving into the next topic, we’re talking about anchor text. We’re actually going to talk about file names too because let’s say now that I actually was talking about wind generators and I wanted to have a picture in this about wind generators.

Well, what I’ve done here is a Google search for wind generators.  I’m going to do an image search for wind generators.

Now one way that people actually come up for this search result in Google Images, and this can be a good way to bring traffic to your site, is by keywording your images correctly. We’ve got Wind Turbines here, if I click on this image, you can see here in the title or in the actual file name its “wind-turbine.jpg.” I do not think you should take other people’s images!

However, if you find an image source that is “open source” and you actually want to use it in something and it’s something you can use, you’re allowed to use – let’s go ahead and save this image as; we’ve save this image somewhere on my computer, we’ll just put it into the right folder here. So I’m in my GreenJoyment folder and I’m going to click “images” and this is called “wind-turbine.” I think I already have one in here … nope; I don’t have one in here called wind-turbine. So I’m going to save this as “wind-turbine” or maybe even “unique-wind-turbine” or whatever.

Again, don’t steal other people’s images! But if you have a source where you can get free images, we’ll probably do a video on that at some point in the future where you can get actual free images. If people are interested in that, please comment below and let me know and I can do a video about how to get free images.

But we’ll go ahead and click “Save” here and we’re going to save this as “unique-wind-turbine.” You can see I’ve got that saved now as “unique-wind-turbine.jpg.”

I’m going to go into my entry here and I can add an image using WordPress, you know how to do this I’m sure if you’re using WordPress. I’m going to go ahead and upload this from my computer, “Select Files” and I’m going to go to my “unique-wind-turbine.jpg” here.

Now I want to go ahead and put this into my post. So I’ll add this image and WordPress gives me all these options, you can’t really see these all that well because my screen has been sized for this video, but I can put it in here wherever I want. There’s a little button down here, you can’t see it, it’s just below where I’m recording, but I can go ahead and just align it to the left and I’m going to enter it into the post.

So that has now been inserted into my post and “This is a wind turbine’s inner workings.” I’m going to go ahead and click “Save” here so I can show you this and then we’re going to go ahead and publish it; you can see I clicked the “Publish” button over here on the right inside of WordPress.

I’m going to go ahead and view the post.

Now here’s the value of having done the things that we did. Number One, we’ve got the caption here, “This is a wind turbine’s inner workings;” so that’s the caption.

But if we roll over this, we have “unique-wind-turbine” is the Alt Text.

So now if I go into my post here, I can click on the image and I can change out the image title.

When I change this title, what it’s going to do is change what is called an “alt tag.” The “alt tag” stands for “alternate” or “alternate text” and what it does is it helps blind people to actually “see” what’s on your website.

It also helps search engines to “see” what the image is about.

So what you can do when you write a description is write a keyword-rich description that relates to whatever you’ve written about and that alt tag will actually help to get you search placement for the things that you are trying to get placed for. So, “Wind Turbine Inner Workings” and make you spell these right and get all the words in there because you’re really wanting to get listed for those.

But if someone is Googling “wind turbine inner workings,” I’m much more likely now to come up for this. I’m going to go ahead and update this and now, if I go over to my post and “Update Post” now that I’ve changed it. Once that’s done, I’m going to go over to the entry itself. Now if I roll over this right now, the text that pops up is “unique-wind-turbine.” Now that’s pretty good, but if I “refresh” it here, I’ve actually got now, “Wind Turbine Inner Workings” which really describes what this image is, it helps Google to know what it is and then helps blind people coming to my website to be able to access the information much more easily.

This is just one little thing that you can do when you put images on your site; edit the alt tags. If we actually look at the page code here, if we go View-Page Source and I just do a search, I can see here that my image has “wind turbine inner workings” and then the alt text – here it is: “This is a wind turbine’s inner workings.” So the title or the alt tag is what shows up when you roll over something to see what it actually is about.

Now you can also see that I’ve done this elsewhere within Green Joyment if you roll over any of these other links.

ü  Household: “Going Green at Home: Building Green Homes and Green Houses, green products for the home.”

ü  Food: “Organic gardening and organic chemistry: Green and organic recipes, organic farming and what are green foods.”

ü  Education: “Environment education and ways to protect the environment through green living.”

ü  Articles: “Environment Articles on green energy and solar energy and green living.”

I can tell this is going out of your screen a little bit, but you can get the idea here.

ü  Travel: “Travel: maps, directions and guides for cheap travel that is also green travel.”

ü  Apparel: “Green and organic clothing.”

ü  Solar Cooking: “Solar Cookers.”

So when you roll over these different things, it actually tells you what those different things are about. Those small changes that you make on your website actually help you to get search engine ranking.

In an earlier video, I showed you this code for a basic webpage. Now when you have an image, here is what the code actually looks like:

<img src=http://www.yoursite.com/images/whatever-name.jpg

This is an example of what that would look like. Now you could just close this off and that would put “whatever-name.jpg” right into wherever you put it on your website. However, you can add an alt tag or a title tag:

alt=”this is whatever”

And this is what you’ve written to describe that image; or you can put a title tag. What I normally do with images, I use an alt tag and with links, I use a title tag. So a link would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”

Or “someone else’s site.com” or a link within your own site:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html”>

Now you could end it right there just like that; but instead, if you’ll go in and add title

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=” “>

And you add something describing that page:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=”this is page 1”>

And use something descriptive to talk about it, it helps Google to know what that page is about and it also helps blind people coming to your website, so you have a wider audience of people coming to look for your products and your services.

That is how title tags and alt tags work, and how you use title and alt tags on your page.

You want to make sure, even if you’re not the one doing it; you want to look at your page source and your code to know if you’re using alt tags in your images and your links.

The only other thing I want to talk about for this video … and hopefully you’ve followed all of this; if not, watch the video a couple of times. Sometimes this stuff takes a little bit to get, but I think you’ll understand it after you watch it a couple of times.

If not, post questions and give me feedback on how I can improve this.

The other thing I want to talk about in this video though is Anchor Text.

Anchor Text is where you link to something. It’s the actual text that describes whatever it is you’re linking to.

So I ended my text here with </a>; I have:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=”this is page 1”></a>

Now, if I put in here “home:”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=”this is page 1”>home</a>

That’s great. But let’s say that page 1 was about “going fishing.”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing.html” title=”this is page 1”>home</a>

Or even more descriptive:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”this is page 1”>home</a>

The title then would be:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”Best fishing in Denver, Colorado”>home</a>

Now I could just say, “home” or “Click Here:”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”Best fishing in Denver, Colorado”>Click Here</a>

And that’s what people would see when they tried to link or when they were looking at your page what the actual link text was. But instead, you could put “Colorado Fishing” or you could just say, “Best Fishing in Denver”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”Best fishing in Denver, Colorado”>Best Fishing in Denver </a>

Again, this is called anchor text and what this does is it actually tells Google and also the people who looking at your website what these different things are about; what your different webpages are about.

It’s a little bit of extra work, absolutely, to make sure you have good page names and to make sure that you have title tags or alt tags and to make sure that you have good anchor text to describe what you’re linking to.

However, if you will do this, it will help; it will help a lot, to get search traffic from Google. By the way, search traffic doesn’t cost you anything and that doesn’t make it better or worse, than Pay per Click traffic; it just means that it’s free!

So if you want to get free traffic, this is one of the best ways you can get free traffic: make sure you have good title tags, good alt tags and good description tags as well as file names that actually use keywords to describe what it is that you’re talking about.

One more thing, I don’t think this is such a big deal anymore, but for a long time Google said dashes are better than underscores. All other things being equal, dashes will almost always outrank underscores.

So if you’re going to use separated page names or separated file names with multiple words in them, I would recommend using dashes instead of using underscores (even though Google is getting better at figuring out the difference between a dash and an underscore). I would make sure I used dashes when describing or using a file name with multiple words in it.

Again, I hope this video has not been confusing!

It’s probably not as clear-cut as some of the other videos I’ve done.

However, you want to make sure to watch it a couple of times to make sure you really understand the stuff, because these four concepts can really help to get a lot of traffic coming through to your website – IF you do a good job with File Names, Anchor Text, & ALT Tags.

Thank you very much for taking the time to watch the video!

Make sure you come back next Tuesday for the next Traffic Tuesday from Three Money Methods.

We’re going to talk about how to find out what people are looking for.

This will let you keyword your pages with the actual words that people are looking for in the search engines right now.

Make sure you come back next week!

Post any comments you have below the video here and look forward to seeing you at the next video from ThreeMoneyMethods.com!

Adsense, Adwords

Adwords vs. Adsense

2 Comments

Hello and welcome back to Three Money Methods!

This is Jonathan Kraft and I wanted to take a quick minute to show you the difference between Adwords and Adsense.

I think a lot of people are very confused about this and that’s ok; you’re just getting started with this or maybe you’ve been around for a while but not really familiar with what goes on with Adwords versus Adsense.

Adwords, the idea of Adwords is … let’s say this is your website here and you want to drive traffic to your website. Lots of different ways you can do that but one of the ways is Adwords. Adwords run in a few different places; they either run on Google or they run on what’s called the Content Network.

So let’s say you have a website and you want to bring traffic in, you go to Adwords and say “hey, I want to bring traffic into my website” and they say “ok great, why don’t you run some Adwords. Tell us if you want to put them just on Google or if you want to put them just on the Content Network or if you want to put them both places and we’ll be happy to do that for you.” So that brings traffic into your website. So Adwords is really a way to bring traffic into your website.

Adsense is something … let’s say this is your webpage. When you go to Google and you say, “hey Google, if you’ll give me some code to put on my webpage, I’ll put a little ad box over here and I’ll put one down here. You figure out what the content of my webpage is about and run some ads that are relevant to the content of my webpage.”

Google comes around and looks at the webpage and says, “I think your website is about …. dogs.” And they go back into the database of advertisers who are running ads with Adwords and they place those ads in the spaces on your website so that those advertisers can get relevant clicks from your website about dogs. There are some advertisers who want to run advertisements about dogs. Let’s say somebody comes to your website and they click on this ad here, they pay Google one dollar and Google, depending on the ad and a whole bunch of other stuff, Google might pay you .30 to .50 cents of that click because it was because of your website that Google got that click. That’s how Adsense works.

Now there are lots of people who make a lot of money with Adsense but the way they do it is by having lots and lots and lots of traffic coming into their website. So that’s one of the key things we work to teach you with Three Money Methods and one of the things I really try to help you learn is how to get traffic to your website; so regardless if you’re doing Adsense or running banner ads or any other method really on your website, you really need traffic coming into your website in order to profit from a program like Adsense.

So that’s the difference between Adwords and Adsense.

Adwords is a way of getting traffic to your website and Adsense is a way of profiting from the traffic that’s coming to your website.

I hope that clears things up. Again, this is a relatively quick video. But I hope that clears things up. If not, please post down below, down below the video here, if you’re on the Three Money Methods site, you’ll see a place where you can actually go and post a comment here. Just ask your questions there and we’ll try to answer them either in a future video or I’ll try and come through and answer them in the comments here.

Thank you very much for taking the time to visit ThreeMoneyMethods.com. Please come back for our Traffic Tuesdays where we are going to be teaching you how to get lots of traffic to your website so that no matter how you want to make money, there are three ways to make money from your website.

Those ways are:

  • Selling the ad space on your website and in this case, that’s what Adsense is, you’re basically selling ad space on your website;
  • Number two would be selling someone else’s products through Affiliate relationships or JV Partnerships which are basically, in a lot of cases, the same thing; or
  • Selling your own products or services.

So in this case, what we’re talking about is selling ad space on your site – that’s what Adsense does. One way you can bring traffic to your website is through Adwords but you profit from people who are running ads in Adwords by selling the ad space on your site as an Adsense “publisher” basically using that space to generate profit and to also generate leads for people running ads in Adwords.

Hope that makes sense.

If you have any questions, again please feel free to ask them below the video here and we’ll look forward to seeing you back here again at ThreeMoneyMethods.com.

Adwords

Basic Overview What Is Adwords? Wallet Example Of Pay-Per-Click Marketing

1 Comment

Welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

I’m your host Jonathan Kraft.

I was talking with someone recently from the Three Money Methods community and who asking me, “you did a really basic explanation of Adsense; but you never did a basic explanation of Adwords.”

And I thought, well there are all these other great people out there who are talking about Adwords and know way more about it than I do, but I’ll do one anyway, just to help people maybe try and break it down really simply.

I’ve also posted a video right below here (from Google actually) about how Adwords works.

Adwords — (my understanding of Adwords anyway) and ways to bring traffic to your websites.

So you have a product or a service – let’s pick an actual, real-world example; so let’s say you sell wallets – I don’t know I’m just making this stuff up! But let’s just say you sell wallets.

So if I’m looking for a wallet on Google or wherever, I might go in and type in the words, “leather wallet,” “women’s wallet,” “men’s wallet;” a whole bunch of other stuff.

I may use all kinds of keywords to describe what I’m looking for.

One of the very cool things, I just moved this to the left here because I think it’s going to work better over there, one of the very cool things about internet technology that is so different than any other sort of advertising that existed before it is that you can target the person who’s looking for wallets.

You can make an ad specific to the person who’s looking for a leather wallet.

You can make an ad specific to the person who’s looking for a women’s wallet.

You can make an ad specific to the person who’s looking for a men’s wallet.

These are different kinds of customers.

What’s really cool is then you can write an ad specific to the wallet person, “Wallets are the Best with Us. Click here!”

That kind of person is going to have a different sort of reaction to this page, if you have different pages on your website, is going to have a different kind of reaction.

So for example, a women’s wallet or a men’s wallet – if you have an ad advertising men’s wallets to somebody looking for a women’s wallet, that’s not going to work.

So you want to have a specific ad that is targeted to someone looking for a women’s wallet and a specific ad that is targeted to someone who’s looking for a men’s wallet.

So your ad would be here; you would take those people to different kinds of landing pages; because if I’m looking for a men’s wallet, you don’t want to take me to your general wallets page. If I’m looking for a women’s wallet, you don’t want to take me to your men’s wallet page, right? You want to take me to a specific page that’s targeted to what I’m looking for.

What Adwords allows you to do is to write ads that are targeted to specific keyword searches and then send those people along to pages that are specific to what they were looking for to begin with.

It’s a really cool system and a really cool setup.

There are other kinds of things you can do as well. You can say, ok, someone who is looking for wallets, are they going to respond to “wallets are the best with us” or are they going to respond to “you can find the best wallet here! Click here.”

Which one of those sets of copy are they most likely to respond to? You can test all of that stuff inside of Adwords. It’s just amazing the amount of things that you can actually test to see what works.

And then yes, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your webpage; you pay per click.

That’s what’s called Pay per Click marketing, PPC marketing. Adwords is a form of Pay per Click marketing.

There are other kinds of things that you can do inside of Adwords as well. But just to give you a basic overview, this is how Adwords works.

Let’s use our example of Adwords here and I have done a search on Google here for wallets and you can see Herbergers.com is advertising, so is Macy’s, so is MyBuxtonWallet.com; there’s a bunch of people advertising on the right too, “High quality leather wallets for the guy on a budget.”

If I’m a woman looking for a wallet, this advertisement probably doesn’t appeal to me that much. But if I’m a guy looking for a wallet, that advertisement probably appeals to me more than just “general wallet.”

So let’s look for men’s wallets.

You can see there’s a different set of people who come up for men’s wallets. Bloomingdale’s is advertising using “Men’s Designer Wallets,” TUMI is advertising using “Men’s Wallets;” Brooks Brothers is not using “Men’s Wallets.”

So it’s probably more likely, if I searched for “men’s wallets,” that my ad would be more likely to be clicked on if I actually used the keywords they used when they were looking in the search results (whoever was looking).

Now “Men’s Accessories from $20” probably doesn’t get as many clicks as “Men’s Wallets.”

“Men’s Leather Wallets” at Wallet Gear: “Hard to find men’s wallets for the guy on a budget.” That probably gets pretty good click-through. They may not be at the top of the search results because they don’t want to be at the top of the search results.  The people who are at the very top of the search results are (generally) paying the most and may not be getting the most return for their money.

My guess, based on just looking at these because it’s got the most stuff around it, they use Google Checkout, they have a $5 off deal here because they use Google Checkout, and this ad is probably getting the most clicks.

Let’s go back and do one more search here just to show how this targeting could actually work.

Let’s look for “women’s wallets” and see what else comes up.

I don’t think it’s very good here. You have J.Crew who is advertising in the Number 1 spot, talking about “Great Looks for Summer and New Arrivals for Him and Crewcuts.”

I don’t think that if I’m looking for “women’s wallets” this is what I want.

I’m not sure why J.Crew is coming up in the number 1 spot; probably because they’re bidding the most.

They’re probably paying too much per click and they’re probably not getting targeted customers coming to their page.

Tusk.com – again, they’re running an ad for “Men’s Designer Wallets” when I Googled “women’s wallets.” Am I likely, as a woman, to click on this ad? Probably not!

But Macy’s now, “Women’s Wallets at Macy’s,” Macys.com/womenswallets. “Shop Women’s Wallets at Macy’s. Free Shipping with $99 order.”

So they are doing a bunch of different things in that ad; we’re not going to go through all of that. But you can see that if you target an ad to a specific kind of search, you’re going to get better results.

I don’t want to click on any of these advertisers, but I would like to show you some advertiser’s landing pages. We’re going to go to the LizClaiborne.com/wallets just to see what’s on this page. But remember, I looked for “women’s wallets” and this is the page that I’m ending up on. What’s fascinating is … check this out! I go to the display URL that they had in their ad, LizClaiborne.com/wallets … “sorry, this page cannot be found.” If I had actually clicked on the ad, sorry Liz Claiborne, I’m going to cost you some money; we’re actually to go see what page this takes them to.

I’m going to click on this ad and see what page it actually takes them to.

But shouldn’t they have their display ad actually take you to a page?

I just typed in the URL; anyway, whole other topic!

The point of this is to go into a very specific topic about women’s wallets. But why wouldn’t they call this page, “Women’s Wallets,” and have a page specific to the keyword term “women’s wallets;” so that when I’m on this page, the first thing I see is wallets for women!

And maybe Liz Claiborne only sells wallets for women, I really don’t know. But you can target specific to the market that you are trying to attract and you can then sell very well to a specific market based on actually targeting the keyword search from the beginning.

You can target “leather wallet” or “men’s wallet” or “women’s wallet” or whatever is in your market.

Google gives you all kinds of tools to help you generate massive lists of keywords. I’ve put a couple of videos right below the video here to help you understand Google Adwords as well as a couple little tips.

I think I put a video here right below from Glenn Livingston about how to find your keyword ad groups.

But this is basically the idea of how Adwords works.

You can target:

– a specific keyword searcher
– for a specific result
– so you can actually help them find exactly what they’re looking for
– from start to finish

I hope you understand Adwords maybe a little bit differently, or a little better than you did before.

Please come back and visit us next week; I’m going to talk about something I know a little more about which is actually getting traffic to your website through a variety of different methods and getting free traffic to your website!

So we’ll be talking about that next week in Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

Thank you very much for visiting us at ThreeMoneyMethods.com!

Explanation from Google Adwords

Making Money Online

Traffic And Controlling The Flow of Website Traffic: Video 2

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Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

This is Jonathan Kraft and today we’re talking in response to last week’s video where I was talking about traffic. We were talking about all the different traffic methods, if you remember from last week.

If you didn’t see the video from last week, I’ve got a link to it right here.

This week’s video:


All these different methods you know, MySpace, YouTube, Scribd, radio; remember I had all those different things on this side – all the different ways of getting traffic and then we had the webpage in the middle and over here we had the three ways of making money online … selling your stuff.

Someone sent an email and said, “hey Jonathan, I don’t want to have my own website. I don’t want to put up all this content and have people coming to it.  I just want to sell other people’s stuff!”

That is fantastic!

But you still need hosting and you need a domain!

And here’s why, for the exact same reasons we talked about last week;
– if one of these methods goes away for you,
– if the ad space company that is paying you for the traffic you’re driving shuts down
– if you’re selling someone else’s product and they change the payment terms on it
– you’re selling your stuff but you suddenly want to sell something different than what you’re selling

The easiest way to switch what you’re doing is to have it all run through something that you control really effectively.

In order to do that, you need to have your own hosting account and your own domain.

Now here’s the thing, you don’t have to put up any real content there, you can just take the traffic and drive it through a redirect page.

A “redirect page” – I’ll show you an example of a redirect here – but all a redirect page is a page you control where the traffic is going and then it just redirects it right along.

So for example, last week in the video, I showed my redirect link for domain names. That redirect link was http://www.threemoneymethods.com/ideas/domain.

if you remember, that was in the video from last week.  Watch what happens when I press “enter” on this or when I click the “go” arrow over here, I want you to watch what happens.

I press “go” and it takes me directly to GoDaddy!

That is where you will be redirected to if you want to buy a domain.

But what just happened in that process is I sent you through a redirect which “cookied” your computer for GoDaddy for me as having referred you to GoDaddy.

So if all you were doing was sending people through a redirect, that would still be better than not sending through a redirect — if you’re just sending them right here.

Let’s say for whatever reason, GoDaddy decides to shut me off as an affiliate; I don’t know why in the world they would do that, but that happens sometimes.

Or GoDaddy decides to turn off their affiliate program.

Commission Junction decided to do this, I was sending lots of people to signup for their affiliate program and they decided to stop paying me for sending people to their affiliate program.

Now I still recommend you go signup for Commission Junction as an affiliate, but I don’t get paid for that anymore; that link that’s still there — I still drive it to Commission Junction.

But let’s say there’s somebody I liked better that I told you that you should go signup for these guys; instead of changing out every link I’ve ever created to this whatever – selling ad space, selling someone else’s stuff or selling your stuff, all I do is change out the redirect!

That’s one simple example of why you need to have your own hosting and your own domain.

There are a lot of other reasons; one of the primary ones being that you should be building a list of people who are interested in the kinds of things that you have to offer, because it gives you a way to keep offering them more stuff.

It’s ten times more effective to re-convert someone who’s bought from you in the past, or someone who knows you from the past, than to try and convert someone new.

So you should be collecting names and emails here.

There are a hundred other reasons why you should have your own hosting and your own domain; those are just two of the reasons.

I think I didn’t explain that well enough last week in the video and so I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope I’ve really driven this point home.

You have to have your own hosting; you have to have your own domain.

If you want to buy it through my links, great!

If you don’t, great! I’d rather you buy it through my links, but if you don’t that’s ok too.

Just make sure you get your own hosting, get your own domain and get it done … get it done today!

You will have to learn and it will probably be frustrating in the process.

But if you get your domain and your hosting through GoDaddy, they have really helpful customer support, and if you buy them through my links, great.

Really, they will help you to get this stuff set up.

Yes, it will be frustrating; yes, you will have to learn and yes the process is part of the journey and that’s a whole other topic we can get into.

Get your own hosting; get your own domain!

We’ll see you back next week for another week of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday!

I promise next week we’re going to talk about this stuff over here. But this point is so important that I devoted two weeks to it. You’ve got to get this stuff done! You’ve got to have your own hosting and domain.

You’ve got to be driving traffic through there!

So, thank you very much! I’m your host Jonathan Kraft. Come back next week for Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

We’ll look forward to seeing you back here next week.

Talk with you soon!

Resources:
– your own hosting account through Powweb
– your own domain through GoDaddy

Making Money Online

Traffic And Controlling The Flow of Website Traffic: Video 1

6 Comments

Welcome to the very first edition of Traffic Tuesdays with Three Money Methods.

I am your host, Jonathan Kraft, and today we’re going to be talking about traffic!

That is what we’re going to be talking about every week with Traffic Tuesdays!

Today, talking about traffic, I want to talk not about specific kinds of traffic, although we’re going to get into that a little bit, but I want to talk about the “flow” of traffic.

Now, as you read from the Three Money Methods Report, the end goal of your website is to make money!

And you read in the Three Money Methods Report that the three ways to do that are to:
1.  Sell your Stuff;
2.  Sell someone else’s Stuff;
3.  Sell Ad Space

But again, the big goal here is to make money!

You can have a passion online but you won’t be able to do it really long unless you have some money coming in from what you’re doing; and ultimately, that’s the goal is to be making some money from what you’re doing.

So over the next weeks, we’re going to be talking about all the different ways you can get traffic; through Facebook, through Twitter, through Pay-per-Click advertising, through radio and TV and newspapers and what’s known as “traditional media.”

Through user-generated content sites, like Scribd and hub pages; through video sites, like YouTube and Metacafe and Revver; through SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization, getting listed in the natural search results of Google; through image search and a thousand other ways that may come up in the next weeks or months or years as you’re part of Three Money Methods. There’s always going to be a new way to get traffic.

We’ll be covering those on an on-going basis through Three Money Methods.

But here’s the philosophy and here’s the idea that I want you to think about because it’s really, really, really important.

Some people will say to me, “Hey Jonathan, you know I’ve got this great traffic thing going on through Twitter. You know I take Twitter and I sell other people’s stuff right through Twitter. Or I take my Facebook ads and I direct them right to a page where I get paid for the advertising that’s on that page.”

Lots of people are sending traffic directly to someone else’s website.

That’s a challenge.

The reason is because if their website goes down, or let’s say for whatever reason, Twitter isn’t working one day – this happened relatively recently. Let’s say Twitter isn’t working one day and suddenly your method of advertising, your method of talking to people is no longer available.

If that were to happen, what would you do – if that was your major source of getting traffic? If that was the only place you could control the traffic?

So what I want to talk to you about is a philosophy which says, you have to have some space online that you control.  A space where all of your stuff, all of the methods of traffic, go through this space.

I’m not talking about a hub page, or a Squidoo page or something like that – you do not control that page.

I’m talking about your own hosting account and at the very least, your own domain.

I’ve got some recommendations for who I use below the video here and if you sign-up through them, you’ll be signing up through my Affiliate Links and yes, I’ll make a little bit of money on that; and that’s fine if you don’t, go sign-up with somebody else if you don’t sign-up through my links, that’s fine.

But the philosophy is you have to control the space!

You have to control the traffic! And the way that the traffic is being directed, because if you don’t, let’s say one day, YouTube and Metacafe decide to stop accepting videos – they’ve got enough videos and they don’t accept them anymore; and that’s been your major source of traffic!

You’ve been directing traffic directly without sending them through some way to capture their name and email or at least building a brand that people know to come to get you, to get the things that you do. If you do not have a way to control where people are coming through, your business can die in a second!

I mean just like that – it can just be gone!

So I want to talk to you to make sure that you understand — if you don’t do this it’s ok, but …. it’s really not ok!

My recommendation is get a domain and get web hosting set up; you have to control the place that you’re driving the traffic back to. You have to own that domain and you have to have some level of hosting.

You can get hosting really cheap, $50 a year. You can get a domain really cheap, $10 a year. That’s an investment that you’ll need to make in your business. And I really, really, really recommend it!

So, we’re going to be back next week with another Traffic Tuesday to talk about:

– selling your stuff
– selling someone else’s stuff
– selling ad space.

We’re going to talk about all these different methods of getting traffic.

But really, philosophically, this is huge; get a domain and get hosting set up!

Do it this week, don’t wait! Get it done!

You then control the flow of the traffic in where the eyeballs go. So if any of these things shut down or if any of these things on this side change, at least you have something in the middle that you control.

I’ve been doing business online for eight years; I used to send traffic directly this way – it’s not a good idea for that to be your sole source of stuff!

Drive traffic through a page that you control and own.

Yes, it will mean you need to learn something.

But really, really go do it! Go do it this week, don’t wait.

And we will see you next week in the Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays which will be coming at you with some awesome free information about how to get free traffic to your website and make more money either by selling your stuff, selling someone else’s stuff or selling ad space.

We’ll look forward to seeing you next week back here at Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays.

Resources:

– your own hosting account through Powweb
– your own domain through GoDaddy

Adsense

How to Make Money With Adsense: How Adsense Works

6 Comments

In this ThreeMoneyMethods Traffic Tuesday video, we explain how Adsense works.

Transcript:
We are here today to talk about Adsense and what Adsense is. The reason for this today is actually I got an email from Sandra Marsh and she said, “hey Jonathan, thanks for the links (she was talking about the Three Money Methods report). But I was wondering if you could provide me with more on how these advertisements work.”

I did not quite understand the question, so I sent back an email to Sandy and I said, “which advertisements?”

And so she said, “Adsense and stuff like that; you mentioned it in the PDF.”

So, what I realized is that I’m starting too complicated; I need to start simpler and help people understand really what Adsense is and how it works. So Sandy, since you’re the one who was brave enough to ask the question that other people were not brave enough to ask even though they had the same question; we’re going to go ahead and do a quick video here to explain how Adsense “and stuff like that” works!

So on one side, you have someone called an advertiser. This is someone who has a product or a service that they want to sell. In the middle, you have Google and lots of people visit Google every day, but not everyone visits Google! Some people visit websites; websites about … whatever.

Let’s say this advertiser has a product dealing with digital cameras, let’s just say cameras over here. They’re trying to sell cameras. What they’re really good at is making cameras, making good deals on cameras, finding better technology for really producing good quality cameras.  So what they do is they say, well, there are lots of people; they’re visitors, here’s the other player in this, there’s visitors who are also called customers. There are lots of visitors or customers who come to Google everyday.

Now this advertiser knows that there are lots of visitors coming to Google every day and so they say, hey Google, could we run some advertising with you? And Google says, sure, no problem! I won’t charge you just to run an advertisement, I’ll only charge you when one of those visitors comes to me and searches for your product and then if they click, I’ll charge you. But if they don’t click, I won’t charge you anything. This is one way this works. There’s a lot of different ways that this works.

But the visitor goes to Google, looks for cameras; the advertiser runs an ad on Google and the advertisement redirects somebody actually back to a camera page. Now let’s use an actual example of Google to see how this is working.

So, we’ll do a search at Google for “cameras” or let’s go even more specific than that, let’s go “Nikon cameras.” Here are some people who are advertising: Walmart.com, OfficeMax.com, and BestBuy.com; those are all “sponsored” links. Then over here on the right-hand side, we also have Nikon digital cameras from Ritz Camera, they’re the advertiser; and we have Nikon digital cameras from Dell, eBay, Amazon, eCameraFilms.com, BHPhotoVideo (I love those guys by the way) and Nextag.com.

Those are all people who are paying to advertise on Google. Those are the advertisers in our equation; Ritz Camera and all those guys, that’s the advertiser and Google is the company they’re going to, to try to get people. Google doesn’t make money from these advertisers in most cases; in this example let’s say, until I actually click on one of these ads and I’m not going to click on that ad because that would cost Ritz Camera and I’m not actually looking for a Nikon digital camera at this point.

However, there are also people on the other side of this equation who have websites and I may not go to the advertiser’s website. I may not click on Walmart or Office Max or Best Buy, I might click on Nikon USA or I might just go to someone … here’s DigitalCamera-hq.com for example, I might just go to this website. So I might go to DigitalCamera-hq.com or I might go to some of these other websites. For example, I might go to DigitalCameraInfo.com because that sounds like maybe a good site for me to find out some more information.

Well, if I go to DigitalCameraInfo.com and if you look up top here, you’ll see this thing that says, Ads by Google. There’s another box over here that says, Ads by Google. But there’s one box up top here — an ad box with Ads by Google. Two different ad boxes there on this website, digitalcamerainfo. By the way, DigitalCameraInfo.com, you can pay me later! They didn’t know I was making this video, but I’m definitely advertising for them!

Anyway, if you look down the page here, there’s another advertisement, this is also “Ads by Google,” this is a display ad. In this equation, I’m the visitor and I’m coming to the website and I’m coming to find out more. Well, I went to Google, but didn’t click on the advertiser’s page; I went to a website over here. On that website, in the case of DigitalCameraInfo.com, there was an ad box up here, there was an ad box right here and there was another ad box right here. All that this website had to do in order to get Google to advertise or run those advertisements on their website, was to go to Google and say, “hey Google, I have a website, can you give me some code and I’ll put it on it.” So Google gives this person some code, that code goes in various places on the website and then once that code is on the website, Google is able to pull from its base of advertisers and put ads into those ad spaces on the website.

As the visitor, if I come to this page on the website and I click out to go to the advertiser, Google is going to make some money and so am I because I’m the owner of the website. This is a lot of arrows and it can get kind of confusing so if you want to watch the video again it will help to clear it up.

But on this side of things, it’s called Adsense. This is where you have a website about a specific topic, you go to Google, you throw some code on your page and when visitors come to your website and click on those advertisements, Google then pays you for having brought the visitor to that advertiser’s website. This advertiser pays Google some money and then Google shares that revenue with you. That’s called Adsense. That’s how Google makes money on the Adsense side of things and that’s how you make money on the Adsense side of things, by running some code on your website. Google figures out what your website is about and they display advertising on your website that you get paid for when people click from your website to go to an advertiser.

Hopefully that makes sense, if that doesn’t make sense, please comment below the video here and let me know how I can make it clearer. I’ve obviously, with all of these arrows, all over the place! This whole picture here, I probably didn’t make it really clear from a visual standpoint, but if you watch back through the video, you’ll see what happened with all those different arrows and what each one of them represents.

Hopefully that makes sense! That’s how Adsense works as a program. If you have a product or service to offer, then what you’ll want to do is look at Adwords which we’re going to cover, at least topically, in a different video.

Thank you very much for taking the time to visit ThreeMoneyMethods.com! Again, please comment below the video here if you have any questions at all about how this works. I’d be happy to answer them in another, upcoming Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesday’s video!

We’ll look forward to seeing you back here at ThreeMoneyMethods.com!